


Dumping Ground (for ficlets. I'm dumping ficlets.)

by TalkingAnimals



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, Mentions of canon character death, Other, Tim gazing longingly at Jon from afar, gay zombified boyfriend kissing, gee Jon how come the beholding lets you kiss TWO iterations of the spiral, jon and gerry domestic life is clearly a priority for me, revolutionary gay boat man manifesto
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21596371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TalkingAnimals/pseuds/TalkingAnimals
Summary: Some fic requests and a Lot of Jon & Gerry because. That's My Brand.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Jonathan Sims, Jonathan Sims/Tim Stoker, Michael/Jonathan Sims, Peter Lukas/Mikaele Salesa
Comments: 9
Kudos: 86





	1. Jon/Gerry 'Undead Kiss' prompt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for the s3 finale in this one, also based partially off the concept of this post: https://suspiciouslibrary.tumblr.com/post/184586382705/

You sit by his grave, mid-day, mind glancing barely over the words in front of you: a book of poems, leather-bound. There’s some appeal to sitting by your boyfriend’s grave in all black, gothic poetry propped open, that you _know_ he would get a kick out of if he were around. And that’s part of the motivation, isn’t it? Tempting the memory of him, like a ghost might manifest just to poke a little fun at an ostentatious display of dedication to macabre.

You have your reservations, based all in the dodgy behaviour and vague comments by Elias: glib amusement at the Archivist’s funeral and smiled remarks of post-mortem ‘decisions’, boyfriend buried in a shallow grave in a lidless casket: ‘Easier to behold, perhaps?’ from his slimy lips when you’d pressed Elias for details, delivered with a smirk.

A familiar felling of being watched as your mom peeled skin from bones in your dreams, the flit of a face on the window quiet and sad, desperately hungry.

You don’t ask the archive staff if he’s still in their dreams, too. You don’t go back to his office anymore, but you do sit at home in his flat: wait for his lease to expire knowing full well it should have terminated three months ago. Knowing there’s no way it makes sense for him to still be on the payroll.

It doesn’t make sense to give into the denial, either, to cocoon yourself in the least productive stage of grief as the flowers overtake his resting place and you read poems about death to a daisy sprung from more or less where you’re sure his head is. But a lifetime of things that don’t make sense acclimate you to these urges, check only their alignment with an entity when you have the time before laying down beneath them, feeling them wash over you and through you and back out of you in turn.

There’s a spider in the next one, something grim about madness and being trapped in a room with the inhuman, consorts with six legs and a hundred legs and their enemies with eight, and you elect to skip it both for his sake and your own. The one that follows is twee: ridiculously placed after its predecessor, flowery language and romantic observation of a female figure, absurd and saccharine and hysterically funny, so you begin to read it with grave importance– the kind of thing he’d light into you for while pretending not to enjoy it.

You lose yourself in the silliness of it, stretch your voice to its baritone extents and catch the eyes of passing mourners: more empathetic than you assume when you feel their eyes hit the weight of your hair and the cut of your profile. You’re attuned to it now, to being _watched_ and how it feels when it starts, where it’s coming from and sometimes, when you’re really focused, to the spirit of it. So when your voice clicks nervously and you feel the sudden stumble of momentum, the deep, deep plunge of being truly _observed_ , your eyes strain against their captors, throw your eyelids up and back and grind makeup deep into the wells of your skin-hugged skull and you turn, arms numb and body automatic, back to his grave.

“Good. I was _hoping_ you’d stop that absurd poetry reading. A little help? This isn’t as easy as it looks – and I _doubt_ it looks easy.”

And he’s there: half underground with his arms braced on the disrupted grass and soil, clump of earth shellacked to the side of his head with the daisy you’d been reciting to sticking defiantly outwards from his hair. You feel the absurdity of your denial spin itself around, invert itself, reinvent, break itself open and show you: this is what this moment always would have felt like. That impossible sureness and disbelief sewn together, the crashing dance of impossibility and destiny.

He stares at you from under a dirt-sodden patch of hair, fond smirk of impatient understanding, beautiful and gaunt and terrifying and meek, with scars of decay that look older than time. Dust and bug bites, life and death, breathed into every inch of him that surfaces from the earth into the sun.

Your lips are on his, fast and desperate, and you feel the bemusement on his lips under your own, hands gripped deep into the dry fabric of his sweater, his collar, the reality of Jon. There is a hand on one of yours, the one that clings, urgent, to the front of his shirt, and it rubs a line so gentle down your hand you almost start to sob.

“Couldn’t wait until I was more than halfway out the ground?” He laughs into you, breath just barely warm over your tongue, and he knows you could not but you answer anyway:

“No.”

Back into him, and he concedes: sweet softness of his palms on your cheeks, over your hair, down your neck and resting in the collar of your shirt. And when he needs you to pull him up you will and in the future when you are the one he needs you do, but for now you are lost in the inverse of destruction: the impossible bliss of infinite potential.


	2. Jon/Distortion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We can never be together" kiss request. Mid-season 3 spoilers

You are spinning, not in a circle but along broken lines: interrupted, explosive, undulation of colour and intensity over your tongue and under your eyelids and under your shirt as your mind whips around itself, struggles as always to keep track of the untrackable. The hands, of which you know, you are _certain_ there are only two, present in thousands up and down your back, along your neck, knit into each other and kaleidoscope painfully through each other and back out again: digging into you, nowhere near you, all simultaneously. And when he separates, hovers his lips over yours there is the echo of the disorientation, the transition he grants you to catch your breath and grasp just the fringes of his impossibility, to put together the puzzle that will change, shift the moment you re-connect.

This was how it always was with Michael.

But he is Helen now, and Helen will never be him, the It manifesting along the skin of a human, the spinning of monstrous constance into the heart of an individual.

When you kiss, old habit strung along a trail of identities, the disorientation and the fascination meet, but the person and the woman do not, hand clung too tightly into fabric and fingers vibrating with a human energy unknown into each other, and your lips too dry and your glasses digging painfully into her nose, and through the beautiful mosaic of nauseating confusion are unfortunately still the idiosyncrasies of a human being, a lifetime of love and anger and particulars that bump into yours with a tangibility too easy to trace, too simple to orient. And while you delight in the way your mind cries as her hair falls over your face in impossible waves and how it burns so beautifully to feel her shoulder cascading impossibly over yours, when you break it is clean and unsentimental, and the look you give each other apologetic, as she closes her door and does not return.


	3. Peter Lukas/Mikaele Salesa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was no prompt for this one except me feeling the need to proclaim "FUCK lonelyeyes we're shipping lonelytrinkets now" and then being possessed by the spirit of old men on boats I guess. That's why the writing is a little conversational at the beginning lol. Warning for nsfw text in this one, death, and s4 spoilers

They screw on Mikaele’s boat one day when they’re traveling together, maybe Peter Lukas is the Captain Mikaele has picked for that trip but more likely he’s just on the boat as a crew member. And for the next few days after Mikaele just feels so…empty? In a way he’s never felt before and struggles to explain. The rest of his crew follows his mood, as they always do, silence falling over dinner and conversations quickly dropped. It takes him a few days, but he finally gets it:

“It’s you.” He tells Peter when he finally figures it out, struggling to communicate through layers of isolation already built up, caked into his spirit. Peter just smiles, doesn’t fight it. And Mikaele presses on,

“You were something evil this whole fucking time. I don’t move _people_ that carry this shit. Only things. You’re getting off my ship the next time we dock, or we’re throwing you over.”

“Doesn’t a ship need to be able to communicate to coordinate something like that?”

“Appreciate that I’m not dealing with you the way I have with other problems on my ship. You should be happy I have some courtesies I’ll extend for a friend.”

“Isn’t having to extend yourself for another so painful?” And Peter asks it with that sweet, wet sadness pulling over his eyes,

“Better to understand how impossible it really is to connect, isn’t it?”

“Be as smarmy and cryptic as you like. Just get the fuck off my boat when we dock tomorrow.”

And Peter does, without protest, and the crew claws its way out of their collective loneliness, forgetting the mood of the ship quickly once it’s passed. And Mikaele mostly forgets, just soft bittnerness burnt under his tongue and the gentle curl of longing left behind by Peter’s absence, felt only in those rare, quiet moments where he lets his body and his brain stop moving.

Crossing paths with someone like Peter Lukas is, in Mikaele’s line of work, unavoidable, and it is a year of travel that separates their maiden voyage and their reunion. Peter promises business, promises decks untarnished by his feet as he negotiates on land, meets Mikaele at his comfort to negotiate terms of trade. And Mikaele tunes out the screaming need in the back of his mind to hold, to connect with another, pats down the amplified desire to reach out and touch the untouchable. And Mikaele is smart, but he is not invulnerable, touched more by humanity than many others in his line of work, so when Peter meets him a second, a third time, business slowly gives way to pleasure as Mikaele remembers the cool breath of his laugh, the conspiratorial joviality of his friendship. And Mikaele is not stupid, but he is human, and he won’t bring Peter out on the water but he will meet him on land, two days of detox for every day spent together. And when he hangs his arms over the side of the boat, sucks back the itch of nicotine and sea water onto his tongue, the after effect of Peter rolls over him, the thrill of chasing the impossibility of connection: the dulling pain of solitude. It becomes comfortable - helpful, even - the acclimation to the loneliness that worms into their moments both together and apart. It keeps him steady on long trips as he remembers always, despite his crew’s investment in him and their attention to his emotions, that he is alone. And sometimes, he is alone with another. That is the apex of human connection, after all: stripped of artifice and ornamentation.

When he misses him, wracked with the agony of despondency alone in his bed, he does not know if he misses the man as another man, or the monster as its captor, but he knows the picture of Peter’s eyes and arms that accompanies the pain. He knows it is too late to wonder, that it was too late the moment he felt Peter on his chest as his hand laid its weight on the door, and hindsight saves no one from the pain of being human, so he sinks into the weight of his misery and looks forward to another lonely night when he’s finally back to shore.

When Mikaele explodes, Peter feels the shift: not a loss, but a change. He can never connect, not really, and there is a sweetness to it: to being an animal beside another, the unending shift of predator - prey - protection that defies capture. The terror of the knowledge that one’s own existence is the only reality, the inability to trust but the necessity to exist among others who are at once close and impossibly far. But there is a shift, always, between loneliness caused by man’s proximity and his absence, and Peter lets the last vestiges of Mikaele roll over him as he submits to the sweet sadness of the latter.


	4. Jon and Gerry are gay and in love compendium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Most of these are just me slamming information into tumblr text posts but they are all part of the Jon And Gerry Are In Love cinematic universe. Spoiler warning for the s4 finale in one of these. Mentions of parental abuse in one as well.

Jon’s entire life after becoming The Archivist has just been accumulating scars and having to look down at hands and fingers that are transformed by endless streams of bodily trauma and the familiarity he has with his own body being altered and distorted by reminders of pain and horror until the first time Gerry paints beside him and blearily shoves a paintbrush into his hand because he’s so deep in the motion of it and every cup and surface around him is already filled and touched with dirty brushes and he just needs Jon to Hold It for a second while he grabs hold of a new burst of artistic _need_ and Jon just grips the wet end, mesmerized by the way Gerry works, and Gerry’s thumb runs a line through the paint when he takes it back; And when it doesn’t wash out of Jon’s palm right away it becomes an antidote, the lasting effect of his proximity to affection layered over the valleys of terror etched into his skin and the longer he knows Gerry the more clumsy hands and unwashed fingerprints run up his arms and over his body until his skin is a map of touch laid over every pocket of painful recollection, lifting them out of his spirit as his body becomes the host site of a transforming faith.

* * *

Sometimes when Gerry’s painting it just hits him like a Wave. The feeling he tries to bury tries to overcome always stuck inside of him wormed into the parts of himself he tries to numb carved too hard into his spirit and when Jon comes home he’s Stuck: stood in the middle of their flat and turning, one way, then the other, caught in the middle of something he can’t always get out of, painbrush still in hand and clung to his elbow, acrylic drying to his hair as he pivots again, spins clockwise under the weight of his history. Jon tries to be deliberate and clear, not taking him by surprise trying to remember the steps he’s supposed to take to make Gerry feel Safe, simple conversation where he’s visible and something to drink waiting on the table, when he’s ready, and Gerry breathing himself into something closer to the ground as Jon hides his stress, better than ususal, gives him conversation and atmosphere he can use to climb down, ladder strung from rope: one strand always connected. When he sits on the couch and starts to come home to his body he jokes the sad, wet joke of necessity, thankful laugh into absurdity as he pulls at the plastic shellacked to his elbow. Jon only looks a _little_ too worried beside him, hand clung to mug and lips tight at the edges of his smile, but he’s mostly doing alright, Gerry thinks.

It’s how she ruins his projects, he thinks, then speaks it: coming back through him to hurt him, his progress, his need to _escape_. So now it’s another half-finished canvas, tacky with anger, interrupted brushstroke thick with the energy of a haunted memory.

And Jon has that misplaced sentimentality, misty over the arts and their importance and his fascination with how Gerry speaks through his hands, and so he won’t give up on it, asks if Gerry minds if he tries to add to it.

And he almost does, because it’s Weird, but he was going to have it staring at him angrily from the corner of the room forever if he let it, and Jon Won’t, so he says Okay, because he’s still got a bit of that _curious_ bent to him too,

And it’s _very_ funny, so he doesn’t regret it, Jon’s needless intensity as he grinds the brush into piles of paint, shitty ones Gerry knew he couldn’t ruin, but he frets at the frayed ends when be notices them anyway. Throws Gerry a little glare when he laughs, heckling comment about using his hand as a palette kept light, because he knows he was The Sad One today so he can get away with it, but Jon’s still sensitive, and fragile, and terrified to Try where people can see him fail.

“Hm. That’s not very good, is it.” He concludes, and Gerry watches the soft panic as he wonders where to put the brush, knows he’s Allowed to look now, lazy crawl to Jon’s position on the floor. And Gerry Does choke a laugh, but because of the sweetness of it, the naive care in the delicately carved oval, the terror in the small thrush of hair, the sweet stoke of the two dotted eyes.

“Self portraiture…gauche? What do we think?” And Jon pops a hand under his chin, mock seriousness, art connoisseur on a dingy apartment carpet. And he gives way before an answer, self conscious, uneven eyebrows and smile as he explains,

“I thought I could at least get the colour right,” And waves his hand, stroke of brown just a touch warmer than his skin, that silent wish for a return to humanity, neighbouring grey as he tried to match his hair, caught on a strand over his face from comparing. It’s sweet, almost _too_ sentimental for the both of them, kiss on a part of Jon’s neck that makes him laugh, so they can lean into the absurdity, always. But Gerry _does_ feel the lifting of anger, the broken seal, and they both catch one another working idly on it: piece of art not sacred, testing brushes over Jon’s painted head and quiet experiments in one corner, when he knows it’s okay, and ideas layered one over the other in a quiet reprieve, peaceful solitudes intertwined.


	5. Jon/Michael gay dreamscape vibing

Exhaustion hits the Archivist, almost routine, the point of no return where he can feel the thoughts as they crumble: dust on his mind, and he leans back in his chair, never giving in to real feelings of rest, the luxury of its illusion. The chair is still welcoming when he lets go, however: the way creaking wood and distressed cushion hit his sides when he allows it to be a comfort rather than a duty, and the swirl of oncoming dreams shaking the foundations of his brain. It's fast, ususally, the passage through this disorienting stage of half-sleep, but it clings stubbornly now, mind half taken by the shaking logic of internal plot, the senseless array of ideas. He's caught, a few times, between rational thought and absurd duty, spinning his mind out from meaningless data that held his rapt attention only moments ago, spinning between blearily real and vividly false. It is only when he fails to recgonize the feelings, when the dreams are too _human_ , lacking in victims and familiar narratives, that he realizes something is wrong.

Part of him whines, rejects the fight of sleep and human dreams once familiar, but he twists his mind sideways, struggles to remember the reality of his office, his chair, the reality of his body. What he feels first, when he starts to focus, is not the structure of wood, of feet on the earth, of hair and thin metal wrapped over his face, but a cascade of ideas: physical realities that push against his bones, introduce themselves into his muscles. He wants to find it less relaxing, less intriguing, as his mind traces the lines of wet sunlight and swirling earth in the pores of his skin, but it all becomes the plot of a dream: pulling his mind along one arm, across his forehead, lightly trailing along his back.

He surrenders, then, to the disorienting rattle of colour through his veins, the calming sweep of static on its heels. To the overwhelm of information as he breathes, pulling in objects and concepts beyond air, irrelevant to it: incredulity and dedication and morality in his lungs, bliss and history and tardiness as he breathes it all out. The warmth is a rolling boil, escalating in his mind as his body feels other versions of the Self flipped through his mind like pages, crawling up the folds of his brain like ants, legs tickling the places where flesh kneads flesh, and he laughs.

He laughs, uneven and hyserical and light as knives, and his head is thrown back, solid scatter of matter and concept suddenly on the back of his head, the side of his face.

He traces upwards, follows the feeling to its source, eyes skyward: the cheap fluorescent lights stopped by the sun.

"Michael-!" He starts, and his body moves too slow as he tries to sit up, tries to find his way out of the chaos of its contact with the front of Michael's shirt.

"What are you- _doing_ , here, I-" And his speech is flustered, said in all the wront directions, the flailing of his mind pulling that floating laugh over every texture of the air, through every point of time occupied between his ears. Michael lets out that breath, that cool amusement that drips from cacophany, thrilled by the Archivist's struggle.

" _I_ am standing here, Archivist. _You_ are the one who fell asleep. I cannot _control_ when you lean back without looking at what is behind you."

"That's-- _ridiculous_ ," Jon argues, and his brows are knit as his head rolls into Michael's side, and Michael laughs when an arm escapes his influence for a moment, flying back and catching him on the leg.

"It's not _nearly_ as hard as you're making it, Archivist. Surely the dimenions of your home are not so hard to _see_."

"I don't _live_ here," Jon protests, mind filling with the vinegar and sugar of Michael's laugh.

"Of _course_ not." He offers, Royalty of Lies.

When Jon finally wrenches himself free, it is an inch or two of movement forward, the world to his brain, and he catches his breath, as if it was -- for even a moment -- actually interrupted.

"What are you doing here?" He asks, saliva-soaked notes of horror over his tongue. His mind cries out for rest, again, but his pulse hits the line of his jaw, rumbling under his tongue.

"Oh, I can't _possibly_ hope to remember that _now_ , Archivist." And when he laughs onto his hand, it carries all the feeling of a forgotten dream, of a world just slightly out of reach.

"How did you...do that?" Jon asks, and the frustation is undercut by mist, far-off and foggy on his voice.

And a piece of Michael's hair falls over Jon's as Michael leans forward: cradling his crown, stirring into the top of his brain,

"How did I do _what_ , Archivist?" And there is a laugh under his tongue, but Jon still has to ask, has to _know_ :

"Dreams," He starts, grasping at theory, at systems and categories and interlocking parts,

"Those are your-- domain, then? You control those as well?"

And the laugh is sharp this time, electric, as Michael watches the way his concepts are boiled down, neutered, turned small and human and _stupid_ under the Archivist's childish scrutiny, the fear of the Knowing undercutting its _need_.

"I _told_ you, Archivist," He sighs on the tail of a laugh, breath that sweeps the meaning from matter,

" _I_ am _standing here_."

And the chair creaks as his impossible hands rest on its back, and Jon gasps when the sweep of hair falls onto his face, ideas nestling themselves into soft curls of contact,

"And I think I've decided, I'm going to be standing here for _quite_ a _while_."

And Jon is still very, _very_ tired.


	6. Jon/Tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I started thinking about jontim because I'm a rational human being with normal emotions so here's a blog post about researcher Tim and Jon.

Thinking about...Tim developing feelings for Jon when they're both researchers, sort of a back-burner feeling, but Jon's interesting, he's delightfully sardonic, he puts both of his arms on the table and leans forwards when Tim talks, like everything he has to say is really _that_ interesting, and they're not compatible he doesn't think, not _really_ , but it doesn't stop him wondering a few times, maybe more than a few, what that part of Jon looks like, how it feels to have that attention and needless intensity all focused on _you_ , if it ever falls off of him and what it feels like to share those moments. But he's a hard guy to get to know, and there's that promotion he's been talking about all of a sudden, and there's _always_ a reason not to expose himself to something _serious_ with a coworker, even if he catches glimpses of Jon with his glasses pulled up onto the crown his head, rubbing his temples and hunched over files that have nothing more to offer him, and even if the sight makes Tim wish he had somewhere to drag him to rest that wasn't just out for drinks.

And then Martin joins their team, and he's _the one with the crush_ , the _obvious_ one, all knocking over piles of paper and stumbling into door frames, and it makes it easier, doesn't it? To be the one who'd be taking something away if he acted on it _now_ , so it's good that there's someone there _actually_ interested, interested _properly_ , not in the way Jon assumes he would be, given the way he wrinkles his nose when Tim tells him about his weekend and Jon asks, _wasn't that the same person you saw a few weeks ago_? Before the other two, he doesn't say, but Tim hears it. Like he's keeping track of the ethics of who Tim sleeps with. Like adults are above communicating with each other. Like he's already decided what distance is safest between them.

So it's fine, and it's probably better, and less frustrating, because Jon is _unquestionably_ a hard person to date, so Martin is free to think it's worth the effort, even if he _doesn't_ laugh at some of Jon's jokes that would send something booming and obnoxious out of Tim, something Jon would curl a wry smile at despite himself, and even if there's an odd _intimacy_ to the way Jon talks to people he finds competent, how he leans into his and Sasha's personal space to ask them a favour, how Martin isn't quite _there_ yet with Jon. So it would be awful to still entertain it, the thought of it, when Martin can't even get the barest pleasures of Jon's _work_ persona, and Tim's at least got that. So Tim's not thinking about it, and he's _never_ been thinking about it, because he's sure if he ever did something with it, that would be the assumption. That there's nothing that sits in him, no weight of nights and days and smiles over glasses and dots of their histories shared over cluttered tables, just impulse and flippancy and shallow connections.


	7. S5 Apocalypse flavoured Jon/Gerry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Swapping out Martin for Gerry in the safehouse to fuck around with the season 5 apocalypse vibes also because if I don't write Jon and Gerry being apocalypse boyfriends I'll die I guess

“I’m going out.” He tells you.

“That’s not a cigarette, you know.” Is your return. He shrugs, and you wish it was a quip about how it hasn’t been for a while. Something that tells you he remembers. But it isn’t, and the front door creaks as he walks out, and you miss him as much as you want him to stay gone, to leave you to rot and transform from human to something extinguished, without tether to reality. You want to be given up on. But your heart still curls in your chest, still aches and curdles and squeals, and you miss him out on the balcony from the depths of your misery: the aching gut of your grief.

He sits on the porch and watches. He’s good at it, too, though it’s nowhere near the career you’ve made of it. The slaughter is close, close enough to tell it apart, anyway, and he doesn’t hold onto the same need to ruminate that you do. It’s all the same net of sadness, grief that flexes, tightens, releases, but under it all you both know that bright lights and soft booms are sat too far to be anything but pretty.

You know he’s back in, technically, but it still feels new when he’s behind you again, wedged between you and the wood of the wall with a knee on each side. You feel his thumb on your arm and safety becomes anger becomes grief, same as every time.

“Sasha again?” He asks. The tapes sound different to him, sometimes, warped by the house, by his lack of obsession. But he knows them.

“All of them.” You clarify, and you start to realize the filth sunk into the blanket around your shoulders. Begin to see it at the front of your mind as you’re pulled back into the room. His thumb is up at your neck, your shoulder, slow and careful. You want to cry.

“You should hate me.”

It’s childish, sometimes, rote repetition of a fact. But he won’t see it and it’s obvious. There’s nothing else to say but what’s clear to you.

You suppose you could say everything, in that case.

“Unfortunate thing, there. Can’t control how people respond to you. I just don’t think people ever realize it works in all directions.” There’s a cigarette between his lips again, and you smile at how limply he bothers with facade: stepping out, staying in, stepping out. He’s better at keeping himself alive than you, better at adapting, you think. You hope. You worry he doesn’t even feel the difference.

That yours is the only mind left.

“Thinking anything useful there, or just the usual?” The light is soft and warm over both palms, his mouth skewed to one sight to reach tobacco to flame, his eyes open and curious as he peeks around your shoulder.

“The usual, I suppose.” You laugh. You are very, very sad.

“Can you still actually smoke these or can you see _through_ them a bit too much now?”

There’s one in his hand, all smoke and blood and bile, and when he asks it something finally shifts. You cry.

You still surprise him, somehow, despite the misery in the room, the house, in the reaches of every part of your mind, the planet’s home. He sits beside you, shifts into something visible, concrete, and you see the way the eyes on his hands have transformed as you bury your head in his chest, the way they blink up at you and feed you back your own pain.

“I might cry if I couldn’t have a cigarette in the apocalypse, too.” He says, and there’s something in you, deep and aching, that’s loving him for it, but it’s always drowning with you. You love him and you are in hell and every day is fucking agony.

“Could go out and see if any haunted shops are still open, you know. Might be something in the area.”

Your arms around his waist, physical force as laughter, your face is too tired and you feel so, so empty.

“I know I said the house was eating us, Gerry,” and you’re not done crying, you don’t think, but you can speak, and he can hear:

“But I still don’t think it’s any worse than what’s out there.”

And he kisses the top of your head and if you could crawl back into your humanity quicker, you’d yank his nose ring for almost making you cry again, rehearse the humour of coping with the incomprehensible.

“Didn’t say it was any better out there.” And you hear the stupid sounds his lips make on your hair and it almost forces a chuckle out of you, too close to hysteria to be properly released.

“I just thought a little walk might be nice.”

And you are laughing, and the floor is under your palms, through your wrists, dirt and shifting foundations as you feel the history of it under your skin, beneath you. And you feel the catalogue of terror under your arms, beside your head, through your legs, the history of emotion and horror and the wailing orchestra of every scream of pain trapped in this room, locked in the walls that breathe and hum around you. And when you are done, you get up, and put on your coat, and hold Gerry’s hand in yours as you open the door.


End file.
